Modernizing the voteOur view: U.S. approach to registration has proven woefully inadequate

By Editorial BoardPublished June 22nd 2009 in The Baltimore Sun

By any reasonable standard, the U.S.
does a terrible job of registering eligible citizens to vote. According
to the most recent estimates, only about 68 percent of eligible voters
age 18 and over are likely to be registered in 2010.

A study of
voter registration systems in other democracies around the world
released last week by New York University's Brennan Center For Justice
underscores this country's failure. France registers 91 percent of its
eligible citizens. Germany and Britain do even better.

Even
within North America, the U.S. is atrociously far behind. Mexico
registers 95 percent of eligible residents and Canada scores 93 percent.

For
a nation that claims to be promoting democracy around the globe, the
U.S. is setting a poor example in the most fundamental requirements of
self-government. How can we claim to be a nation where a majority rules
when so many citizens don't participate?

The core problem is
that unlike most democracies, the U.S. places the entire burden of
registering on individual citizens. People must generally seek out
their right to vote, and inevitably there are obstacles to overcome
from unprocessed registration forms, inaccurate purges of voter roles
and other too-common errors.

The federal government doesn't take
such a haphazard approach with income taxes or Social Security; why
must voter registration be treated so indifferently?

A far
better model would be for the U.S. to take the more activist approach
favored by our neighbors to the north. Canada faces many of the same
challenges that this country does - voting is not mandatory,
registration is decentralized, and it's a mobile society with an
estimated one-seventh of the population moving each year.

But
the difference is that the Canadians keep a database of voters that is
continuously updated by a slew of government agencies, from motor
vehicle departments to post offices to tax authorities. The U.S. also
gives it citizens an opportunity to register to vote when they enroll
in college or get a driver's license, but it's a modest outreach by
comparison.

The U.S. needs to make modernizing voter
registration a top priority. One answer may be for more states to offer
registration on election day. In Minnesota, where that's been the
practice for 30 years, voter turnout is relatively high with little
evidence of double-voting or other forms of fraud, according to a
recent report sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Surely
there's a way to capitalize on 21st century technology and computerized
data-sharing to keep voter rolls accurate and complete - if Congress
can put aside the customary partisan bickering and disinformation that
so often blocks efforts at voting reform.